Tagged: MIT

Why do we care ?The first engine Torque supported GNU/Linux (and a few GNU/Linux games were released using this engine) but their second TGEA (Torque Game Engine Advanced) sadly didn’t.
With Torque3D porting games to GNU/Linux was possible, but haven’t been actually done yet – and no official GNU/Linux support was given.
Now that this engine will be free software, it could improve to support GNU/Linux and make games like The Age Of The Decadence and Dead State possible to port to GNU/Linux ! (although no official porting plans were announced yet)

It *might* even be possible to port the whole engine to GNU/Linux so people can develop games using T3D on GNU/Linux !

Eleven years ago, The GarageGames founders did an incredibly innovative thing when they sold a full source game engine for $100. We are excited to continue in their footsteps by announcing that we will be releasing Torque 3D as the best open source game technology in the world. Once again, GarageGames will be changing game development.

Why are we doing this?
Nine months ago, we realigned the goals of GarageGames; making Torque 3D available via a permissive open source license is a strategic move towards fulfilling the company vision. Our first goal was to use iTorque to build a new product we call 3 Step Studio. We envisioned a game development tool that requires no programming at all and began to build it. This product is available today for free, but it’s very, very, early in development and we expect to iterate many times before it is a commercially viable product. Our second goal was to build a service division. I’m happy to say that we’ve already booked our first million dollars in service work and we expect the growth trend to continue as we make Torque 3D more accessible. You can visit our services site at services.garagegames.com. We are very well prepared and staffed to provide support, training, and custom development.

Our long term plans are to focus on innovative uses of game technology. Currently, all GarageGames employees have the option to work on any project on Fridays. We are working on some really great projects under the initiative and it’s our hope that we will be able to invest in several of these projects as they evolve. We’ve encouraged our developers to open source these projects. If you think you have what it takes to be an innovative developer using game technology, consider applying for one of our open positions.

Dave Wyand will be leading the T3D open source effort and he has posted a blog describing the details around how we will run the development process. But before you dive into the details with Dave, I’d like to leave you with answers to some expected questions:

Is this version different or a subset of T3D?
We’ve split off some modules as separate downloads and we’ve removed some art to bring down the payload size. Other than those changes, the versions are the same.

Is this just a way for you to dump Torque 3D?
No. We’ve been using T3D internally for service projects and we expect that to continue. In some cases, our service work will directly benefit the core code base.

I recently bought your engine, I feel ripped off.
We will be offering refunds for T3D purchases that happened on or after Sept 1st but before this announcement.

What about other GarageGames engines?
We are starting open source efforts with T3D and learning from this experience. For now, the other engines/products are not available via the MIT license.

Hold on tight, GarageGames is on path to change the way games are made and played.

The big news coming out of GarageGames today is that Torque 3D will be going open source under the MIT license. This is huge, and something that we’ve discussed internally for a while. Eric has just posted a blog talking about why Torque 3D is heading in this direction and a little of the history behind the decision. If you haven’t yet read Eric’s blog please head over there and read it first.

The other piece of news that I’m excited to share is that I will be leading the charge on future Torque 3D development with the help of, well, you, of course!

Personal Introduction

While the veterans out there know who I am, many of our newer community members may not. I’ve been a part of the GarageGames community since January 2002, and most of that time I’ve been an Associate. My first commercial game dev product was Torque ShowTool Pro in 2004, which was one of the first 3rd party products sold through the GarageGames online store. Those were exciting times when the whole Indie game development scene was trying to define itself and building momentum.

After the launch of TST Pro I began working closely with GarageGames. I’ve had my hand in nearly every game engine we have launched (plus a few internal ones), and along the way I came on board full-time (and have been for a number of years now). Last year I was the Technical Lead on Torque 3D 1.2, the last retail version of the engine.

In 2010 I launched my own gaming portal Zworldo that focused on Torque 3D based web games. A lot of what I learned there made its way back into T3D 1.2, which shows that it really helps to use the products you make.

How will the open source version work?

We’ve chosen GitHub to host the Torque 3D repositories. GitHub has taken on the role of the location for Open Source projects on the Internet. It allows for great community interaction, encourages the forking of code bases, and easy merging of changes. And if you’re not yet into git (GitHub for Windows and Mac are tools that really help), GitHub supports both Subversion access and automatic Zip archives of all repositories.

Anyone may have Read Access to the public Torque 3D repositories. You create your own fork and do your development work there. You can merge updates from the master branch into your own as they become available. And if you have changes you wish to share with the community to be integrated back into the master, you create a pull request and someone with Write Access can review the changes and merge them in.

Who will maintain the repositories?

To maintain the master Torque 3D branch a committee will be set up that has Write Access and may respond to pull requests. This committee is dedicated to making the best core version of Torque 3D so that others can build upon a reliable foundation. Performance, reliability, maintainability and scalability (should turn that into a crest 🙂 are the goals of this committee.

The launch committee will consist of the following GarageGames members:

Dave Wyand

Eric Preisz

David Montgomery-Blake

Scott Burns

Quote:Our mission is to build a foundation for a sustainable environment that fosters collaboration and community development of the greatest open source game development platform.

However, we don’t believe that committee members should only come from GarageGames. One of our primary tasks is to seek out and retain qualified core team members that are dedicated to our goals. Over time everyone but myself will be replaced by members of the community and the committee will be allowed to grow as required.

What will be included in the open source version?

The complete Torque 3D 1.2 source code, along with the four starting templates, will be included in the GitHub repository. A separate repository for reference documentation will be set up. Other items, such as the FPS Tutorial template, will be part of a separate download to help keep the main repository to a manageable size.

There are other, closed source components of Torque 3D that I would like to open up following our launch.

Post Launch

Following the launch of Torque 3D on GitHub, another job of the committee will be to come up with a roadmap. We’ve decided to wait until after launch to do this because we want community feedback to help chart our course. My personal list of things I’d like all of us to tackle are:

Performance and bugs

Further separation of core from other layers

Additional platforms (OSX and Linux)

Everything is up for discussion at this point. This really is the most transparent development process we’ve ever had.